#rsrh Doug Schoen: Democrats doomed.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Well, not in so many words: but when you write something like this… well, that’s pretty much the equivalent of saying that all you need to make a perpetual motion machine is to repeal the laws of thermodynamics.

For the Democrats, there is hope—more hope than would have been expected before Tuesday. But that hope is based almost totally on running as far away from Washington and the established political leadership as possible, and embracing a socially and fiscally conservative agenda.

Which is to say, that’s true, but it’s not going to happen.  The people giving money to the Democrats right now don’t want their party embracing a socially and fiscally conservative agenda; they want liberals raising taxes and expanding government.  Which is why Joe Sestak is signed up to lose to Toomey in November; and why Halter is close to successfully replacing Lincoln as the candidate to lose to Boozeman; and why Democrats all across the land are wearing visible symbols of their opposition to a popular Arizonan law.  It’s ram-your-head-into-a-brick-wall time for the Left, and they’re all lining up to have a go.

Besides, shall we list every ‘conservative’ Democrat out there who betrayed his or her constituents when ordered to by Nancy Pelosi?  Trust me, it won’t be any trouble; we’ve been keeping careful track.  We’re also holding a pool to see when Critz is first forced to betray his district…

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Doug Schoen: Democrats doomed.

500 SEIU bully-boys vs. 1 14-year-old.

Nina Easton* got to meet the faux-populists of SEIU up close and personal:

Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that — in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action — makes his family fair game.

Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

Just a couple other things to note: the normally media-loving SEIU didn’t bring the media, the SEIU’s trying to unionize BoA, SEIU owes BoA several million dollars, and the intended victim is himself a Democrat.  AND HOW’S THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY, GREG? Anyway, read Big Journalism for more unsavory details – but guess what, taxpayers!  Your tax money was spent on police support for union intimidation of a child!  Doesn’t that make you all warm and fuzzy inside? – and check out Hot Air to see the video of the liberal defending the SEIU while pretending not to.  Continue reading 500 SEIU bully-boys vs. 1 14-year-old.

Argentine anti-plagiarism bill rips off Wikipedia.

I don’t care who you are, this is funny:

Techdirt reported recently that a politician in Argentina who introduced an anti-plagiarism bill has come under fire for apparently copying some of the language he used without crediting the source, a practice some have called “plagiarism.”

What makes it funnier is that the parts that got ripped off were from the entry on plagiarism itself.  I believe that the technical term for this is “You’re doing it wrong…”

Liberal Mask Slipping Watch, Libertarian Edition.

Mind you, Matt Welch is not surprised that it has; otherwise, his fairly comprehensive evisceration of this Salon article whining about the maturity level of libertarianism would have been a good deal more, ah, exercised.  I imagine that being editor-in-chief for Reason generally means that one gets used fairly quickly to the pander-then-minimize cycle that libertarians get from both Democrats and Republicans – I say this as a Republican, mind you.  I’m not even apologetic about it: my only regret is that we pander too little and minimize too much.  Why?  Because of paragraphs like this:

The “worldview” of libertarianism suggested, back in the early 1970s, that if you got the government out of the business of setting all airline ticket prices and composing all in-flight menus, then just maybe Americans who were not rich could soon enjoy air travel. At the time, people with much more imagination and pull than Gabriel Winant has now dismissed the idea as unrealistic, out-of-touch fantasia. They were wrong then, they continue to be wrong now about a thousand similar things, and history does not judge them harsh enough.

The differences between libertarians, liberals, and conservatives can be handily seen with this paragraph.  When asked whether the government should be involved in something, the libertarian will default to “No;” the liberal, to “Yes;” and the conservative to “I don’t think so.”  What a lot of conservatives forget is that their answer and the libertarian answer is not quite the same; once a conservative is convinced that government intervention is acceptable or even laudable he will enthusiastically support it*.  And what a lot of libertarians forget is that while “No” and “Probably not” are not quite the same, “No” and “Yes” will never be the same; even in places where the results would be the same the process is significantly different**.  In other words: to a libertarian, a conservative is an ultimately unreliable ally (and vice versa).  But a liberal’s just going to be somebody who’s only right by accident.

What?  What do liberals forget?  That conservatives and libertarians have triple-digit IQs, of course; and that they can read.  Hence, absurdities like the Salon article that sparked Matt’s ire.

Moe Lane

Continue reading Liberal Mask Slipping Watch, Libertarian Edition.

Gerry Connolly (D, VA-11): are your consituents bigots?

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) Given the way that the Democratic party’s leadership has been viciously attacking supporters of the Arizona immigration law, this is a fair question to ask. It turns out that a county which is partially represented by Rep. Connolly (Prince William County, Virginia) has been checking the immigration status of suspects since 2007:

For the last three years, a county in Virginia has remained under the radar in the immigration debate even though it has a law almost identical to Arizona’s immigration law.

[snip]

In 2008, the University of Virginia conducted a survey to see what effects, if any, the Prince William County law had. It concluded initial fears about racial profiling did not happen.

And let us not pretend that Connolly does not know about this bill; when he was Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Connolly called the measure demagogic and raised the (false) specter of racial profiling (when he wasn’t helping turn Fairfax County into a sanctuary county).  Of course, that was then: now he brags about denying illegal immigrants health care coverage and pounds the table about the need to secure the borders first and how broken the federal immigration system is.  Oddly, though, I see no sign of when this apparent epiphany took place, which suggests that it was not an epiphany at all: merely expedience.  So I ask this as a supporter of immigration reform: where do you stand, Gerry Connolly?  Do you – like me – stand with the people of Prince William County, who stand with the people of Arizona, who stand with the people of the United States of America?

Or do you stand with the fringe?

Moe Lane

PS: Virginia hasn’t done its primary yet, but check out this VA-11 GOP site.

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh He must have gotten some distance.

Quote of the Day, ‘Blew himself up’ Edition:

A man whom the U.S. described as a key figure in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula accidentally blew himself up, U.S. military officials told Fox News.

The officials say Nayif Al-Qahtani was “messing with a bomb” when it went off. U.S. officials had been watching him, but Fox News’ sources insist the U.S. had nothing to do with his death.

Al-Qahtani was “a vibrant guy linked to ongoing operations planning, and his death will have an impact,” one official told Fox News.

Via @allahpundit, and bolding mine. Also, I put ‘Blew himself up’ in quotes because the guy was in Yemen (where we’re probably not supposed to be dropping smart bombs on terrorists) at the time. Now, of course, he’s on Yemen…

OK, my wife looks skeptically pedantic at that one. How about, ‘That’s just Al Qaeda all over*?’

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh He must have gotten some distance.

So, the bee people came…

…and the bees… apparently swarmed away in response.  Interesting facts:

  • Bees can slap together a hive fairly quickly.
  • There’s anywhere from 10K to 20K bees in a swarm.
  • That’s a lot of freaking bees.
  • And apparently bees are ninja: they can just… disperse, and you’ll never know where they went until they swarm again.
  • You can tell European bees from African bees from the lack of bodies associated with the former.
  • People who collect bees are very, very eager to collect more bees.
  • And, generally, people who collect bees are kind of nice.  Everybody I talked to about this was of cheerful temperament and civil demeanor.

That’s it.  I just wish I knew where the swarm went.

Moe Lane

PS: I got my wife to admit today “Yeah, Moe, that’s a swarm.”  She knows I’m phobic – big time – so she half-thought that five or six was my swarm.

HA!